SPRINGFIELD -- The state has awarded the University of Massachusetts $5 million for computer equipment to power its data science and cybersecurity initiatives in Springfield and Amherst, which are already supported by MassMutual.

Think of computer programs that teach themselves to work better by studying examples of their own calculations, said Andrew Kachites McCallum, UMass professor and director of the Center for Data Science. These new graphic processing units, which will be installed at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, learn lessons in days that it took earlier technologies months to learn.

"This puts UMass on the forefront of what is going on in data science," he said.

Gov. Charlie Baker, UMass President Marty Meehan and MassMutual CEO Roger Crandall made the announcement Wednesday at the UMass Center in Springfield.

In June, MassMutual announced that it will donate $15 million to UMass computer science programs over the next 10 years. This is the largest grant MassMutual has ever made in support of an initiative in the region.

Of the $15 million, $12 million will support the UMass Amherst Center for Data Science with additional faculty, a doubling of the number of available courses and an expansion of the master's degree program.

In Springfield, the company will donate $3 million over 10 years to expand a cybersecurity certificate program taught at the university's center in MassMutual-owned Tower Square. The cybersecurity certificate program is an eight-week, 15-credit-hour program.

Data science is the emerging field of using the oceans of numbers generated by our modern, connected and computerized world to further our understanding of everything from economics to agriculture to climate change.